National Building Museum

This guide to the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., once the U.S. Pension Bureau, opens with an 1878 fraud case in which one man invented seven dead soldiers' widows to collect their checks. It follows why Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs built the hall's towering columns from painted brick rather than true marble, and the hundreds of special examiners who worked out of rooms like this one chasing false names and invented injuries through the 1890s. Stand beneath the columns and look up before reading on.